"Don't judge my heart," George W Bush scolded Al Gore when the vice president questioned his record as Texas governor. Mr Gore retreated, insisting he meant to do nothing so personal. But Lydia Camarillo would not have held back. For her, it is personal.

Mrs Camarillo is in an unusually good position to judge the quality of Governor Bush's compassion. She lives in the colonias, the Hispanic shanty towns clustered in the Rio Grande Valley. It is the poorest corner of the nation, from where the warm, fuzzy campaign talk about the governor's much-vaunted heart and his concern to "leave no child behind" seems, at best, surreal.

Viewed from here, Texas is a harsh state of extreme inequality, which has become more unequal under Mr Bush's leadership. In a time of booming economy and record budget surpluses, the governor's corporate allies have made a killing at the lucrative intersection of state government and business. Meanwhile 45% of the population in the lower Rio Grande Valley live below the poverty line and pray that they never need medical help they cannot afford. It is an unforgiving place, unrecognisable from the progressive and tolerant state evoked in Mr Bush's stump speeches.

The governor's powers are strictly circumscribed by the state constitution, but with less than a week potentially separating Mr Bush from the White House, his priorities and policies as Texas governor give clear indications about how he might lead America.

Mrs Camarillo views him as a negligent, absentee landlord. She points out that he has never even been to a "colonia" with its mostly Mexican-American population. In his five years as governor, Mr Bush has been to the border region only a handful of times, for "photo-opportunities". But unlike all his recent predecessors, he has never strayed into the huddled grids of dirt roads and shacks, so he cannot have smelt the dizzying odour of a thousand pit latrines and septic tanks when the rain begins to fall.

"When it floods it brings up all that stuff," Mrs Camarillo said. "It rises up and gets into people's houses."

When her son, Robert, fell ill with bronchitis she hesitated before taking him to see a doctor because she had no health insurance. When his condition became serious, she panicked and rushed him across the Rio Grande, to the Mexican border town of Reynosa. "The doctor there said if I had been just a few hours later, he would have been dead."

Lydia Camarillo's plight is not unusual. There are 1.4m uninsured children in Texas, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the country, be cause Texas, under Mr Bush's governorship, makes it harder than any other state to get affordable healthcare. Lydia and her husband, Belarmino, have no steady jobs. She bakes cakes and sells them from home, and the family migrates northwards in the summer to work as agricultural labourers.

But the Camarillos' most prized possession, a pick-up truck, is valued at over $2,000 (about £1,380), which is enough to disqualify them from Medicaid, the government funded free healthcare scheme. They are considered too "wealthy".

This was an issue to which the governor gave unusually detailed attention. His administration blocked the adoption of a national child health insurance programme (Chip), which offers affordable care to families just above the absolute poverty level. Although the scheme is funded entirely by the federal government, Mr Bush argued that 20% of the applicants "will come in seeking Chip but will be enrolled in Medicaid instead", and that would have to be paid out of his state budget. In plain English, he was afraid poor Texan families would find out what free medical care they were entitled to. His administration fought an attempt to put it on the state legislative agenda in 1997. Instead, he spent much of the state's $6.4bn on tax-cuts, including a $1bn cut in property taxes. Under increasing duress last year, he suggested a more limited scheme which would have excluded 200,000 children, before giving in to political pressure.

"On Chip, he was no good at all. He had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming," said Ernesto Cortes, a leader of the local community action group, Valley Interfaith.

In his standard presidential campaign appearances, Mr Bush now claims credit for the Chip scheme, which has evolved into an essential element of his bipartisan "compassionate conservative" image.

It is spin of Orwellian boldness. It is still tougher in Texas than in almost any other state to gain access to Medicaid. And in a region where the per capita income is $7,700, less than half the Texas average, the Bush administration in 1997 actually attempted in 1997 to lower the minimum wage of $3.25 an hour.

Mr Bush's governorship has overseen a steady deregulation of business, at the expense - his critics argue - of the individual. Nowhere is this clearer than in tort reform, the central plank in Mr Bush's election campaigns in 1994 and today.

Crudely put, the law limits the ability of courts to inflict punitive damages on negligent businesses. It would, Mr Bush promised, curb the spread of "junk lawsuits" by avaricious lawyers aimed at extorting money out of innocent firms.

But tort reform also affected people like Donna Hall, whose husband Charles was killed in 1996 in an explosion at a refinery in Amarillo, at the opposite end of Texas. He had repeatedly complained about the state of the valves, but the management had neglected to carry out maintenance work. A jury imposed $42.5m in punitive damages on the refinery, Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, but under the tort reform laws, a judge unilaterally reduced the award to $200,000, barely enough to cover the cost of taking the firm to court.

Once again, where there were losers, there were also winners - in this case the company. The legislation also restricted claims on Texas insurance companies, who, according to the Centre for Economic Justice in Austin, made $3bn in windfall profits as a result. The insurance industry has subsequently been a significant contributor to the Bush presidential campaign.

Most polluted

On the other end of the winner-loser scale are JR and Lupe Cordova. The couple live in Houston, which last year overtook Los Angeles as the most polluted city in the nation. As a focal point of the petro-chemical industry, it has always been a dirty town, but from where the Cordovas stand, it has got a loss worse.

Perched on the Houston Ship Channel, their neighbourhood, which goes by the ironic name of Woodland Acres, has been suffocated by the seemingly unregulated industrial sprawl around them. A steel firm called North Shore Supply Company built a galvanising plant across the road from them, despite zoning regulations defining the street as residential. Despite the family's complaints, those regulations have never been enforced, and the plant continues to add to the burden of chemicals and black dust in the air. By their own accounting, Houston industries pump nearly a million tonnes of pollutants into the air each year in "accidental" chemical releases. The condition of the air alone is estimated to cause nearly 1,000 deaths in Houston a year.

The Cordovas' son Stephen, 10, has chronic bronchitis and, like his father, a near-permanent rash which turns the skin on his arm red and tough. At elementary school, he would vomit after every meal. Their daughter Jessica, 15, had such severe asthma that she was unable to go outside for more than 20 minutes at a time. "My daughter tells her version of our life together. It's all seen from inside looking through the window at us outside," Mrs Cordova said.

Mr Cordova developed severe sinus and respiratory problems and had to leave his job as a docker on the channel, but he still wanted to stay in the blighted neighbourhood he had grown up in. But, the Cordovas were forced out of Woodland Acres anyway.

After Mrs Cordova, a schoolteacher, became prominent in a campaign by local mothers to force national environmental standards on the local industries, the couple began receiving death threats. In November 1999, someone blew the windows out of their car with a shotgun. That was too much, and the family moved to a suburb in north Houston earlier this year. They have yet to find jobs there and they are unable to sell their house in Woodland Acres. North Shore Supply offered $14,000, and Mr Cordova angrily turned them down.

As far as the Cordovas are concerned, Mr Bush is entirely responsible for their plight. "George Bush had the authority to do something about it, and he did nothing," Mrs Cordova said.

The environment is one area where the Texas governor does wield almost absolute power. He is responsible for appointing the three members of the state regulatory board, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC). Mr Bush, whose 1994 election campaign was sponsored largely by oil and petrochemical companies, appointed three men with close ties to Texas industry under the chairmanship of a former lobbyist for the chemical and genetic engineering giant, Monsanto. There were no representatives from environmental or consumer groups. If he becomes president, environmentalists are concerned he will do the same to the Environmental Protection Agency, whose intrusion in Texas affairs he has noisily resented.

Under agency pressure to do something about the loopholes in the state's environmental laws, the TNRCC held closed meetings in 1996 with executives from the petrochemical industry and came up with a voluntary compliance scheme, with no penalties and a long grace period.

The law did little for Houston's atrocious air quality. But, like many of Mr Bush's policies as governor, it did a lot for his political viability. The companies which were given the opportunity to draft the law donated $1.5m to the governor's 1998 re-election campaign and, according to the Texan environmental group, Public Research Works, they have given $1.1m to his presidential effort.

"That is what he did as governor, what is he going to do as president?" Mrs Cordova wanted to know. "If he's going to lead the country the same way, where are we going?"